The difference between people who keep moving forward in life and those who stall sometimes isn’t talent, luck, or hard work. It’s the habits they choose to say goodbye to.

A friend of mine, mid-thirties, used to answer every email within minutes. Weekends, holidays, dinner with his kids. Didn’t matter. Then one Sunday afternoon he put his phone in a drawer, told his wife he wasn’t checking it until Monday, and went for a walk. He told me later it felt like withdrawal for about two hours, then like relief. Six months on, he’d been promoted. Nothing else in his work had changed except the thing he’d stopped doing.

I’ve been sitting with that story for a while, because it lines up with a pattern I keep noticing. Through running a language school, working in finance, entrepreneurship and now writing, I’ve crossed paths with a lot of people. Some keep climbing. Some stay stuck. And it took me far too long to figure out what actually separated them.

It wasn’t talent. Some of the most gifted people I’ve known stalled out completely. It wasn’t luck or hard work either. The ones who kept moving weren’t necessarily putting in more hours than everyone else. What they were doing was letting things go. Habits, mostly. The people I’ve watched keep advancing year after year aren’t adding more to their lives. They’re subtracting. They’ve quietly said goodbye to things the rest of us still cling to, and once you see the pattern, it’s hard to unsee.

Quick caveat before I go further: I’m not a productivity coach, psychologist, or anything credentialed. Just one writer noticing patterns and reading the research where it helps. Take what’s useful.

Here are four habits forward-movers tend to drop.

Saying yes to everything

I used to be a chronic yes-man. Running the language school in my twenties, I’d take on every new initiative, every extra class, every favour a colleague asked of me. It felt like the right thing to do. Helpful. Committed. Dependable. What it actually was, looking back, was scattered.

People who keep advancing figure out something important: every yes to one thing is a no to something else. Warren Buffett is widely quoted as putting it more bluntly. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” The principle holds well outside of investing.

Forward-movers protect their time fiercely. Not because they’re selfish, but because they understand that scattered effort rarely produces remarkable results. The cost of yes isn’t just the hour you commit on the calendar. It’s the focus, the energy, and everything else you don’t get to do because you said yes to this instead.

Waiting for motivation to show up

As I mentioned in a recent post, for years, I treated motivation like the weather. Something that just happened to me. On the days it appeared, I wrote a lot, hit the gym, knocked out errands. On the days it didn’t, I waited. Usually, those days turned into weeks.

Those who keep moving understand it works the other way around. In Atomic Habits (great read for anyone planning on changing their habits by the way), James Clear makes the case that the standard order is backwards. We tend to assume motivation comes first and action follows, when in practice action comes first and motivation tags along once you’ve started. His “two-minute rule” for building habits, making the entry point so small that starting takes almost no willpower, works on exactly this logic.

I see this every morning at my desk. I rarely feel like writing the first sentence. But once a few lines are down, something shifts. The page stops feeling intimidating. The ideas start arriving. The trick isn’t feeling ready. It’s getting started anyway and letting motivation catch up.

Trying to multitask their way through the day

This is a huge one. I used to be proud of my multitasking. I’d have five or even six windows open, be listening to a podcast, and a another conversation happening in my head. It felt productive. It felt impressive. Look at me, getting so much done at once. Except I wasn’t.

The American Psychological Association’s summary of the foundational research — Rubinstein, Meyer, and Evans’s 2001 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance — found that the small time costs of switching between tasks compound enough that repeated task-switching can consume as much as 40% of someone’s productive time. 

These days, when I sit down to write, I close every other tab. Phone goes face-down on the other side of the desk. One thing at a time. It’s been one of the better changes I’ve made to how I work.

Avoiding anything uncomfortable

This is the habit that, in my experience, separates the forward-movers from everyone else more than any other. The instinct to dodge hard conversations, hard workouts, and hard decisions is one we all have, and I’d love to say I’m immune. I’m not. There are conversations I’ve put off for months because they felt too messy, workouts I’ve talked myself out of after a glance at the rain, decisions I’ve delayed because every option felt uncomfortable in some way.

But every time I’ve actually pushed through and done the hard thing, life has moved forward. Every time I’ve avoided it, life has stayed exactly where it was.

Susan David, a Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of Emotional Agility (2016), puts the principle as cleanly as anyone: “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” Her broader point, that tough emotions are part of the contract of a meaningful life rather than a sign of getting it wrong, is one the forward-movers seem to have absorbed earlier and more thoroughly than most.

So here’s the question I’d put to you, and the one I keep putting to myself. Of those four habits, which one are you still defending? You already know which it is. You felt a small flinch reading one of those sections. Maybe it was the yes you should have said no to last week. Maybe it’s the conversation you’ve been carrying around for months, hoping it resolves itself.

It won’t. And the reason you haven’t dropped that habit isn’t that you don’t know better. It’s that the cost of keeping it still feels lower than the cost of letting it go. That maths only changes when you decide it does.

What are you going to say goodbye to this week?

About this article

This article is for general information and reflection. It is not medical, mental-health, or professional advice. The patterns described draw on published research and editorial observation, not clinical assessment. If you’re dealing with a serious situation, speak with a qualified professional or local support service. Editorial policy →